


rebirth

by xingseul



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Heteronormativity, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 16:08:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15028274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xingseul/pseuds/xingseul
Summary: joohyun has a boyfriend. everyone says he's lovely, but her blood curdles when she sees him; she hates him but she doesn't know why. wendy is her best friend who fills in the gaps. she didn't realize it at first, but maybe her smile makes her a lot happier than it should.





	1. my boyfriend

I hated him. I hated everything about him.

I hated the way he said my name, and how his lips curled when he did so. Whenever I felt Taehyung’s hot breath on my ear after we were finally alone together, I felt vile rising up in my throat. But I always let him kiss me or wrap his arms around me, because that’s what I was supposed to do. My mom always talked about the wedding, and while my dad was never fond of me having a boyfriend in high school, he seemed to approve of Taehyung. So I was satisfied. Not with him, but with the validation from my parents. Still, nothing felt right. Every time I came home from hanging out with him, my showers lasted for over an hour and I didn’t seem to care when the cold water left my body pale and quaking. My friends seemed to swoon over him, and that’s when I decided that they were brainless. How could anyone fawn over a boy who did nothing but holler and say things that were miles away from being funny? How could anyone find his deep but hollow voice attractive? He repulsed me, so I just rolled my eyes when Sooyoung and Yerim gushed about how dreamy his eyes were. ‘What is he like in bed?’ they always asked, ‘How big is he?’ I wanted to kill him. Whenever he came close to me, I felt as if his cologne was a chloroformed rag being stuffed down my throat. 

No one could keep my name out of their mouth. Girls I had never spoken to before whispered bitterly that my popularity had made me into quite the bitch; boys who I’d made eye contact with for two seconds three years ago said they wanted to teach me a lesson. Those days, I was always quiet - always absorbed in the schoolwork that I couldn’t care less about. I heard every bitter word coming from my classmates’ mouths, but I still smiled warmly when they attempted to ‘befriend’ me. Time went by so quickly, that the summer between Sophomore and Junior year hit me like a moving train car. I could no longer use the ‘I’m studying for finals’ excuse when asked to go on a date with my appalling boyfriend. 

Even in this miserable time, there was one person who made me grin even through the tears. Wendy had been my best friend since Freshman year - the rainbow streaming from the clouds, the reason I still smiled. I adored her, not only because of her smile and warm personality, but for the fact that she never doted after Kim Taehyung. In fact, she never wanted to talk about him. She was goofy. I always pretended to be annoyed, but we both knew that I wasn’t. She had a sense of humor that sometimes didn’t resonate with me, because of the differences between what’s funny in Canada and what’s funny in Korea, but we made it work. She knew everything about me, even when I didn’t say it. My silence about my boyfriend spoke louder than any words could have, anyways.


	2. morning sunshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> joohyun and wendy decide to go out before settling down for their movie night.

It was 8:00 AM, and my phone was already ringing. At first I thought I was in the middle of a dream, but upon hearing the hum of a vacuum cleaner from the apartment above mine, I begrudgingly realized that this was real and that someone was trying to contact me.. on the first day of summer vacation.  
“Good morning,” I grumbled. I assumed that the caller was either my mother or father, because no high school student would purposefully wake up this early during break.  
“Hey,” a familiar voice started, with the sort of distanceness that would lead you to assume that the speaker was preoccupied with something else. “..what movie’re we watching tonight? Something freaky? Or something, like, romantic or uhh…” 

I grinned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, listening intently as Wendy seemed to be shuffling through a stack of DVDs. “Why do you still use DVDs? Why not just Netflix or something?”

Wendy exhaled on the other end. We had this same argument every Saturday morning but it never seemed to get old. “I like buying the physical copies because they look cooler. And you can watch them even if someone doesn’t have Netflix or Hulu or whatever. Hey, what about this cowboy film from the 1950s?”

I ignored her question and sprung myself out of bed, examining myself in the mirror for a moment before rolling my eyes and walking towards my nightstand. Propping my phone between my shoulder and ear, I smeared lotion on my face before continuing to speak. “Do you wanna go somewhere before we watch the movie? I don’t have anything to do.” I remember being so desperate to leave the house and see Wendy that I stopped moving just to listen and hear her answer. I feared that she would be going somewhere with her friend, Seulgi, and wouldn’t invite me along as well -- this had happened several times before. Seulgi was a sweet girl, but somehow I felt that she didn’t trust me, and Wendy seemed to feel this too. 

But luck must have been on my side that day, because Wendy didn’t waste any time saying ‘yes.’ 

We agreed to meet at an older coffee shop, one that was tucked between a dry-cleaners and a pawn shop in the rougher part of town. There was something strangely intimate about it. I had never taken Yerim, Sooyoung, or even Taehyung there as it seemed like something that should only be shared between Wendy and I - I didn’t know my reasoning behind this, besides the old assumption that best friends should have secret hideouts; and if the city was too crowded to have personal treehouses, Wendy and I would make do with the dusty, cheap coffee joint the best that we could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's summer so i'm gonna be writing a lot. this looks like it's gonna be super fun!!! 
> 
> if you plan on reading this, you'll see that the chapters are quite short. maybe they will all be like pieces of a puzzle to fit together...


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